More than 100 policymakers, academics, educators and activists met last week at a symposium sponsored by the University of Michigan’s Risk Science Center, in the United States, to take a broad look at understanding risk and sustainability in the fast-paced world of emerging technologies. In the end, the participants turned again and again to the question of education and engagement, discussing how people want information and whether or not they want to make their own decisions, or do they just want to be told a product is “safe”. Hilary Sutcliffe, a symposium participant and the director of MATTER, a United Kingdom-based organization that specializes in public outreach, said, if there is one thing the past has taught us, it’s that “we will get it all wrong.” The American system, for its part, is mostly set up to prevent dangerous products from coming onto the market, via a lengthy pre-approval process – but such methods take time and technology is moving ever faster. Peter Preuss, the chief innovation officer in the office of the assistant administrator for research and development at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said, “I don’t think we can deal with these types of problems with the system of governance that we have today. The pace of innovation is now six months … I don’t think there’s a governance structure that can deal with that.” Wisconsin law professor R. Alta Charo said she worries more about the public’s attitude, which she describes as anti-intellectual and anti-science. When it comes to understanding new technologies, the public has to delegate some authority to experts, but they don’t want to, she said. Sutcliffe added that while people want to be involved, they don’t want have to dig too deeply into the details of every new drug or food product. “Go to them where they are and talk to them in their language, rather than having them talk to us in our language and come to us,” she said.
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